Behind the Scenes of the "Archer" Season 4 Finale

Matt Thompson and Neal Holman have been making television together since the early aughts, when they first worked on Cartoon Network's Sealab 2021, part of the line-up that would lead to the creation of Adult Swim. Now, they collaborate on FX's Archer, the bonkers send-up of '60s spy shows created by Adam Reed (co-creator of Frisky Dingo). Thompson serves as executive producer, and Holman's the art director.

"Neal and I have been making TV shows together for 10 years now," Thompson says. "Every year we say, 'Next year is the year we do it the right way.' And it never works out."

Thompson's talking about planning and execution. For fans and critics, Archer has always worked out the right way. In its fourth season, the show is smarter, funnier, and more eye-catching than any other animated program on TV.

Let Thompson and Holman tell it, things could be smoother. To get a better perspective on the creation of the show—the two-part finale of the fourth season especially—Thompson and Holman let Complex glimpse the behind-the-scenes action. This is how Archer is made.

As told to Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)

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Matt Thompson: "Adam Reed writes the script, and 99 percent of the time he writes it by himself. People think there's a writers' room for Archer, where all these jokes are tossed around, or that there’s a ton of improvising. No. The majority of the show is written. Which is rare for a cartoon, especially a comedy.

"The script goes to Neal, in Art Direction, and FX, for notes, at the same time. Art Direction is in charge of the look of the show, environmental design, and storyboards. They spend a couple of weeks with it before it's passed to the next department. At this point, the episode is moving in a kind of pyramid, with Art Direction at the top, and the offshoots below. Once they have a plan for environmental design and storyboards, it goes to several departments at once.

"It'll go to the 3D department to make 3D backgrounds. It'll go to the illustration department that creates the different gestures, moves, and clothes for the characters. The storyboards will go to the edit department. While that's happening, we're waiting on voice acting. In a two week period, we'll have recorded the audio for the show, and we’re editing it in conjunction. It usually lines up that, once the editors finish, the storyboard department will have had enough time it can then go to animatic.

"Then, from all these different departments, the pieces come back together in the animation after-effects department, making it a diamond more than a pyramid. They take the animatic from our edit team. They’ll take the drawings from our illustration team. They'll take the newly painted backgrounds from our background team and comp them all together. Then you have these 30-second movies that are fit together back to back to back, and on top of the original animatic edit.

"The only thing we don't do here, in Atlanta, is the final mix. That final mix goes to a guy in Atlanta while we’re still in the process of doing final tweaks to the animations. Eventually it’ll come back to us and we’ll all sit around and watch the final animation with the mix before we kick it to tape. That's the process."

Matt Thompson: "Depending on the difficulty of the episode, 50 to 70 people are involved in the process. And they're all involved in art. It's very rare for someone to work here who didn’t go to art school. Neal and I have been making cartoons for long enough that we can teach anybody how to do the managerial work, how to do the scheduling, all of those things. But what we can’t teach is how to have an eye for what is wrong with this picture and how to make it better.

"I'll get resumes from friends of friends, saying, 'Oh, look at my son.' My first questions: Did this person go to art school? Can they draw really well? If the answers aren't yes, I'm not interested."

Neal Holman: "Art animation is exactly what Matt said: Can you look at this drawing and tell me how to fix it so that it looks better?"

Matt Thompson: "We work in one big room in Atlanta. And it's quieter than you think it is, because everyone's wearing headphones."

Neal Holman: "It's library quiet."

Matt Thompson: "Our actors have lots of other projects, so they're often traveling. We record them wherever they happen to be. They all record by themselves. We get them over the phone or using this service called ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network).

"Usually Adam Reed and Casey Willis, our line producer, direct the actors during the recording session. If Adam isn't available, I'll step in for him.

"Some actors run through just their lines, and some prefer that you read a scene with them, as if you were rehearsing the dialogue from a play. Some actors prefer to get the gist of their lines and then read that line three times in a row with three different attitudes.

"However they choose to do it, they read, we give them feedback, then they read again. H. Jon Benjamin and Aisha Tyler usually have the most lines. But even then, they're still done in about an hour and a half."

Matt Thompson: "It used to be difficult, but not anymore. People like the show, now, and want to work with us. The thing is, we don’t have a lot of money. Still, I have a list on my desk of people who've said they would love to do it and I'll eventually give them a call.

"But a lot of time, there’s nothing juicy enough for a guest star. You don't want to put somebody on the show for just five lines. It has to be something cool and good. Like in the finale.

"We’re big fans of Eugene Mirman and Kristen Schaal. We've wanted to work with them, and now we finally have."

Neal Holman: "I think it'd be funny if we could get Tom Hanks to voice that drone that's in the corner of every exterior shot of ISIS."

Matt Thompson: "I'd love to get Daniel Craig, and have him do absolutely nothing spy-related. Have him in drag, or as a talking whale."

Matt Thompson: "It's definitely one of the most expensive episodes we've ever made. I don't want to say how much we spent, but let me put in perspective. When Neal and I were making Sealab 2021, the budget for the first couple episodes was $38,000. Later in the season, we got around $100,000. In other words, we paid Adult Swim; we lost money. We don’t lose money anymore, but we also aren't near your normal half-hour filmed sitcom budget. The normal budget is a million bucks; we're way below that. But even if you compare us to other cartoons, we’re under that too, because we're efficient.

Neal Holman: "There's no cheap way around animating water, the huge flooding in the finale."

Matt Thompson: "Because of the water, I'd say it's the most challenging episode of the show ever. We also had to create so many new backgrounds. And it's not like we could just reuse backgrounds from Sealab. There are some similarities in the looks, and hopefully fans recognized that.

Neal Holman: "The Morocco episode was harder for me."

Matt Thompson: "The Morocco episode had flash animations of a dog. That's just as hard. Dogs equal water."

Neal Holman: "By doing bottle episodes that are just set in the ISIS offices, that allows us to save money to pull off these larger cinematic episodes, like the finale. Everyone is a lot happier drawing new sets and facing new challenges than they are drawing the same old guy in a suit, in an office you've seen before. But that excitement only lasts so long when you're here at night or on the weekend, still drawing."

Matt Thompson: "Or if your background gets cut. We had to six or seven of the Sealab interiors and backgrounds."

Neal Holman: "The way our production schedule works, we’re storyboarding as the voices are being recorded, so we have no idea how the actors are reading their lines. We take our best guess. Sometimes, the actor is saying line a lot slower than we anticipated and this one shot is taking way longer than we though or he’s just running through it and there’s too many storyboards to go with it. So the audio edits always affect how the storyboard works out and sometimes we need more and sometimes we need less."